Is voting child's play?

	Predicting Elections: Child's Play Click here for more information.

Both children and adults seem to look for one important thing in a leader -- an appealing face, researchers report in the Feb. 27 issue of Science. Voters are known for making snap judgments about a political candidate and then generally sticking to their choice regardless of information that becomes available later in the campaign. New research suggests that we make these decisions in a particularly childlike way, using facial appearance to infer a candidate’s competence. In this Brevium, John Antonakis and Olaf Dalgas used photos of two candidates (the winner and runner-up) from a past election in France and showed them to adults in Switzerland who didn’t know anything about the election. When asked to rate the two candidates’ competence based on the photos, most of the volunteers selected the winning candidate. The researchers then repeated the experiment with a group of children who had just finished playing a game involving a computer-simulated trip from Troy to Ithaca. The children were asked to select which of the two individuals they would choose to be the captain of their boat, and their choices were indistinguishable from the adults. Although it’s unclear precisely what aspects of a person’s facial appearance indicate competence or leadership, the authors note that young children and even infants classify adults (and other children) based on their facial appearance. These new findings suggest that adults are using the same type of facial-inference scheme that children do when inferring competence of leaders.

Article #8: "Predicting Elections: Child's Play!," by J. Antonakis; O. Dalgas at University of Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland